* HOT lanes in the Bay Area: they allocate demand efficiently and subsidize multi-people transport. I wish there were more.
* Toll roads in Texas: you can take the slip roads almost everywhere but they’re slow. The highways were fast but you had to pay.
Overall, I think fare at point of use is a great structure. In the past we couldn’t enforce it but now we can do this for more things.
The only problem is that we’ve decided that impounding cars that don’t have license plates or which have license plate covers is unacceptable because the poor do this most frequently. I hope we will clean up enforcement and then we will have the right incentives here.
Asking someone to waste maybe up to an hour of their life everyday to sit there and watch people willing to break the rules speed by and get to be home early with their families breeds massive resentment, and anger. It encourages people to abandon all sorts of social contracts.
1. Trucks - not keeping the lanes, speeding (it's 70mph cars and 60mph trucks, trucks bypass me when I'm driving 70).
2. Old company vans and pickups - that's surprising to me, but I frequently see some old Gutter/Plumbing/Heating van darting in an out of lanes. I'd think they'd get fined or in accident sooner or later, but still.
3. Large pickups. They usually are speeding, going in and out of HOV lane closer to Seattle. Never saw HOV enforced on I90.
The enforcement was somehow increased this year, but only until heavy traffic (you can see it daily 5am-6:30am), but never during heavy traffic, which would be more helpful.
I think it's more of the self-deception that they're more important than others and that they're meaningfully getting ahead of others. This is a major issue in American culture where it's not just about doing great, but about doing "better" than others (competitive in areas it's pointless to be competitive about)
One thing I have noticed from using satnav is that even with a mostly motorway journey the difference between driving fast and driving at a more leisurely pace is never more than a minute or two per hour compared to the predicted time.
I knew it from seeing how often I later caught up with someone driving very aggressively, but quantifying it made me realise just how consistent the small difference is.
And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.
I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.
E: it is not legal to pass on the right in MN, unless you’re on a multi-lane road; which is basically all major arteries and thus makes this law unenforceable for all intents and purposes.
I used to have to do this round trip commute, and could consistently save ~3 hours per week of time by driving more aggressively, and I never got a ticket driving like this doing the commute weekly for years.
I do however try to be as courteous and safe as possible, and would time my lane changes to maintain safe following distances and not actually cut people off. If people would stay right except while passing like they're supposed to, this wouldn't be needed.
Whoever downvoted your comment has either never driven this stretch of the 5 or they are the reason it is so bad.
It’s the idiots in cars who insist on doing exactly 65 in the left lane next to a semi that cause the problem. Get past just one idiot holding back hundreds of cars and you will find miles of completely open road.
Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.
A $490 ticket every 5 years works out to only $1.88 per week- effectively free for anyone that makes enough money to commute in a car in the first place.
The wealthy speeder shrugs it off, while the poor speeder has to change their spending allocation in a way that is noticeable and could be challenging.
Why should the punishment have a different impact based on wealth? The felt impact of a monetary fine fundamentally depends on how much money the offender has. Whereas the classic “locked in a cage” punishment affects everyone equally.
Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc. In other words, many people just pay a injustice fine to avoid more trouble. This would punish those type of people even more.
The system is in fact architected to maximize this in some states. Virginia and Ohio come to mind.
Has this been tested and shown to be successful or is your confidence based on feels?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine
Surprisingly they were experimented with in the UK, for a very brief period of time. But not taken into use.
Every now and again a particularly large fine, often for speeding, will make the news. For example this story does the rounds now and again "Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket":
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
All I can say is that when you've been asked to pay €50,000 for speeding I suspect you'll be hesitant to speed again, and so I believe the system works.
Great. Fine me $1 million, and I will fight the case with lawyers, thus slowing down the public legal system for thousands of other legal cases, whether traffic related or otherwise.
And by "IDK" I mean "I have some suspicions but they're not flattering to the community".
Most of society doesn't share most of HN's pro-jackboot disposition so there'd be warnings, appeals, etc, etc.
As a comparison point, it took a 20yr frog boiling exercise to turn DUI into a huge state revenue stream and that's at least backed by a crime most people can agree is fairly serious. To get the same for less serious crime you'd need to invest even more up front in propaganda because people aren't dropping dead from road infractions today like they were 40+yr ago so your ability to appeal to emotion is even more limited.
We can't even release the Epstein files. We don't go full jackboot on petty crimes with a victim. To think that there's public apetite to ruinously fine motorists out of large sums of money over petty victimless infractions is Luxury Space Communism (TM) type tone deaf lunacy.
And this is all assuming you get a bunch of friendly judges because this stuff is pushing it in terms of what the 6/7/8/14th amendments will tolerate.
Like FFS, get out of your filter bubble people.
It's not that the poor person speeding is any less dangerous than the rich person speeding, it's that the $300 fine doesn't really matter to the rich person. It's just a price they're willing to pay on random occasions to go faster.
If you define dangerous as "how dare that BMW not use a blinker" type moves, yeah that stuff is everywhere.
If you define dangerous as "Y likely to cause an accident given X exposure" then it must be tautologically rare because if people were behaving seriously dangerously get bit by it in fairly short order. I can't remember the last time I saw a "wow, that was really pushing it and in poor taste" move. Weeks perhaps.
And make the fines based on income.
Driving a car without a registration will (in theory) get you pulled over, and eventually your car will be impounded.
In practice? Car ownership is required to participate in society in most parts of the US and governments are very unwilling to take away people's ability to drive.
Because there isn't support for the iron fisted rules enforcement a lot of HN favors and if the .gov just did it anyway the people would elect politicians who promise to reign that in. Keeping the power on the books and rarely using it is what benefits .gov the most so it's what they do.
i truly see enough people doing this when i commute that at $500/ticket i could cover my entire state income tax in 1-2 days. seems obviously economical to enforce this.
Seems like a pretty ideal system. Having that extra lane wouldn’t solve any issues for most drivers. For high occupancy or those willing to pay, it does.
Under high congestion traffic throughput plummets. Restricted access to one or more lanes lets you keep them flowing at near the peak, increasing the overall throughput of the system by much more than one of the congested lanes.
When before/after studies have been done, the HOV lanes around here generally make everything worse.
On a few of them, but not the ones I commute on and am talking about. If you do use one of the 'pay' lanes, it becomes free if you switch your fasttrak device to '3+' setting, and given the frequency of visually obvious violations in the ones you can't pay for, I would be surprised if many people are actually paying for the ones you can pay for.
> I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced.
OTOH, I don't know how you could effectively enforce that single occupant vehicles are paying.
For automated enforcement, there's prior art in red light camera systems that mail tickets/violations to the registered vehicle owner.
It's something that isn't straight obvious though. When I got there I also thought that people were just in violation of the people requirement.
I don't get the point of the occupancy reader if there's no hard-requirement of 3+ in the current zone. Maybe there are some stricter HOV-only lanes nowadays? I left the bay area in late 2023
Once when bored in very slow nearly stopped traffic during rush hour on a stretch of the 80 with no fasttrack, and in a vehicle high enough to see if there were kids in the nearby cars, I counted a large sample (about 50) cars and found that roughly two thirds of the HOV occupants were in violation.
The money raised by auctioning access is of some public benefit, but is it enough to offset the deep unfairness of the public granting, for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?
If you're in SF and you get a call that your mother is in the hospital in SJ and it's 5pm, you would happily pay $100 in tolls to get there (I think the actual price is less than $20).
Unfortunately, there is no practical way to do this other than by charging money to use the fast lane, and this means that the rich will get more of the scarce resources than the poor.
This is no big deal - it's kind of a tautology, if you really think about it.
> for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?
Housing prices already have this kind of effect -- highly compensated employees can afford to live closer to their preferred locations. There's no reason not to allocate road resources to the users who are willing to pay for them (which is a much broader segment of the population than just software engineers). Pricing is a better system than road communism.
A dog-eats-dog jungle of underdeveloped monkeys in clothing, on the other hand, sure.
The standard Econ solution is to set a price that maximizes throughput. At least some toll roads are attempting to hit that price.
https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freewaymgmt/hovguidance/chapter4.ht...
This covers pretty much all of the lanes that people complain about so I'll stand by what I said.
The "this is how money works" argument doesn't work well for chattel slavery and it doesn't work well for this either...
They’re a money / surveillance grab.
It’s not a money grab as much as moving more of the actual cost of freeways onto drivers who are mostly used to externalizing it
https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/help/invoices-and-penaltie...
I'm having a hard time finding a citation but according to Google's AI summary if the second violation is unpaid they put a hold on your DMV registration, and the fine itself can be sent to a collection agency.
I agree empirically I see people driving through the lane without a tag (i.e., no number shows up in the overhead display), but maybe these are people with FasTrak accounts being lazy?
Rarely a good citation. No pun intended.
Or lie and set the transponder to 3 people
Or don't have license plates so can't be identified
I spend about four to five months per year in the Bay Area, but have Canadian license plates. The website doesn't even let you enter a Canadian plate, or a foreign plate.
So I bought one of the transponders at Walgreens, and just leave it in the glove box because it has 20 bucks or something when you buy it.
But I can't check its status, don't know how much is left on it, have no idea what I'm paying, really sucks.
There's a lesson about society and government in there.
However, when you’re looking at 100’s of cars doing the same thing false positives only account for a small percentage of that.
And I think at certain times it's only >= 2 people.
If you want to feel pissed about something: One of the most popular new cars purchased in California was the Jeep Wrangler 4xe, because it gave you HOV access and a $7,500 tax credit, even though nobody charges it and its battery is anemic anyway.
No, I'm not mad about the Wrangler 4xe, it's really great that plug in hybrid tech is moving into a wider range of vehicles useful for things like rough terrain. A small battery is still plenty for the vast majority of driving people actually do.
Every system?
I don’t like that it creates separate classes of infrastructure for citizens based on their ability to pay. Even the non-toll highways had an HOT-like lane you paid per-use to drive on that was often significantly faster than the free lanes.
It makes a system where I suspect many people won’t want to pay to upgrade the free infrastructure because they don’t use it, and people who can’t afford the daily tolls waste even more time in traffic. The fast pass lane are even worse because they cannibalize lanes that could be used to alleviate general traffic (and were typically sparsely used).
The tolls were substantial for some people. $3-$8 a day on toll roads (ie no fast pass lane). At $8 a day, that’d be $40 a week, ~$160/month. That’s nearly 20% of the weekly pre-tax income of someone making Austin’s $22/hr minimum wage.
If you want cars off the road, you tax rich people and build trains and bike lanes, and shut down cynical RTO. Full stop.
This is almost diametrically opposite to parking-oriented cities and sprawling suburbia.
Every time I attempt to read it, halfway through my brain flips into the mode that is normally reserved for when people start telling me that Ivermectin is a COVID remedy, or something equally farcical.
The first two smell like communism, the last massively harms the rich people and their playthings (REITs - real estate investment trusts). Won't happen, not in countries where Big Money is pulling the strings (i.e. the US, Germany and UK).
idea: Maximize the income of the toll lane and use the money to subsidize new free lanes or other forms of mass transit.
We saw this very clearly recently with the Manhattan congestion road tax. $9 paid no more than once per day to drive into Lower Manhattan is close to nothing by NYC standards, yet traffic still dropped substantially and stayed suppressed.
If you want to raise the money to buy land and build a private highway, price segment away. If you want to price segment a publicly owned and operate commons, it needs to be in the public interest.
You can argue about popularity if you want, the topic is actually about whether they're "in the public interest" though. Those are distinct things, and "I don't like them because they're unpopular" is pretty hilariously circular logic -- not the type of thinking I'd want my name attached to, that's for sure!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
>The problem is that the model no longer works. Over the decades, the cost of maintaining roads and highways has risen, even as cars have become more fuel-efficient. And raising gas taxes, even just in line with inflation, is generally considered to be political suicide. The last time Congress did it was in 1993. The result is a giant deficit. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27bn more on maintaining roads than it collected in tax. At the state and local levels, fuel taxes covered barely a quarter of road spending.
So apparently that's how the owner intends to raise the money and build. Beyond that, "who should pay for government spending" is of course the perennial discussion, and exactly what we are debating right now.
Driving and public transport is not a business, it is a civil service.
Should we begin to offer tiered plans for EMS as well?
We do sort of have tiered EMS with insurance and ambulance costs. When my buddy came to the US from India, he was told, "unless you're blessing out, call an Uber to the ER."
It seems like a good property that someone who uses something the most pays the most.
If something has positive externalities such as vaccines or education then I’m fine subsidizing or making it free, but traffic has negative externalities.
Getting better government services logically follows from paying more for them, but the idea is so sacrilegious and alien that people would probably riot.
Anyway, the point is not about the precedent but whether it is sensible. And that's not to imply that I love the country being sold off to billionaires and corporations right now. For medical care I go the other direction - we need the government funded base offering.
Certainly, but in many states, at least on the west coast (not to imply anything about elsewhere, just no experience or knowledge) they are privatized but rates and metering are still regulated.
> Anyway, the point is not about the precedent but whether it is sensible. And that's not to imply that I love the country being sold off to billionaires and corporations right now. For medical care I go the other direction - we need the government funded base offering.
And I 100% agree here. I have a fairly unique (or at least uncommon) set of experiences: was born in Scotland under the NHS, grew up in Australia under Medicare (the public health system), and have been in the US for 15+ years now, and worked for a good portion of that at least part time or full time in EMS and seen every day the consequences of lack of access to healthcare or access in a way that is focused on acute care versus solid proactive and routine care.
That, in fact, isn't always true.
In Austin, for example, I-45 was supposed to have "frontage roads" all along it so that people could avoid the toll road if they chose at the expense of going through a few traffic lights.
Gee, guess what somehow magically never got built in many sections of I-45? So, your options are pay the toll or go a LONG way out of the way in order to avoid it since the construction of the tollway also destroyed the old routes.
If you want to help poor people, tax and then redistribute. Don’t make a million small rules and discounts that make things less efficient and our society poorer.
But ... government income is largely dependent on the rich, and government spending largely benefits the poor. This is what is always forgotten about it. The reason debt is such a thorny issue is that debt really benefited the poor. And over time, so will these toll roads.
The reason toll roads benefit the poor is that the rich don't travel anyways, and this gives extra economic options to the poor. A large portion will figure out how to use this extra economic option (because that was thoroughly checked before the bridge was even built, and it wouldn't have been built if the answer wasn't that they would)
So both the building of the bridge, and the use of it almost exclusively benefit the poor.
It's maybe not "fair" that some people can use this option indiscriminately every day, but at least it is an option that everyone has access to. There's no physical barrier stopping you from using the Texas toll roads if you really needed to in an emergency. All that will happen is a bill will appear in your mailbox about 30 days later. If you choose to not pay it, the chances something bad will happen are approximately zero.
You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.
You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.
Is it?
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/9247~143809/Comparison-of...
People like you are funny too but its easy to make posts like yours. Density in most urban parts of Japan and Taipei are wildly higher than say a Houston Texas. Again like I said, you are oversimplifying the problem which I get it, its easy to do. I don't think this is as simple as "build the rail, then upzone the area around stations", would happy to be wrong but I think like all of the world there are cultural and historical reasons for the difference.
It would take decades, you need buy in from both tax payers, commercial buildings, retail spaces, home builders etc.
It would be great if you could have a central planner like a China to just build a city with all the infrastructure in place but in places like America, that does not happen and so its a very tough egg to crack. Keep in mind its not just about being hot, definitely lots of Japan and Taiwan are very humid but you are also in city centers that have 8-9x the density of Houston. Lots of things to do and often you are most likely not walking that far, relative for city walking. I could walk a mile in Houston and still have not left my starting spot.
I do think there is room for more these "New Urbanist" style developments which I have seen a few of in Texas. w the builder puts retail buildings centralized in the development. Lots of real parks and other type of shared resources for the community. Something where you still have a house with a yard but you can walk to the coffee shop in your neighborhood.
I'm being harsh, Houston isn't completely terrible. There is a lot of culture and diversity. But you can't really get to it because everything is too far, and you're already tired from commuting 10 hours that week.
I mean, ideally, I could say I want to live all on my own in a mansion far away from everyone else. But I still want access to the world's best food, entertainment, and socialization. But it's just not possible.
Everything is compromises. We can't be erecting hundreds of miles of road and acres of parking lots so people have a 10 by 10 foot lawn, you know? And ultimately it will come back to them, too. Because commuting does suck, and I think most people know it sucks. They just can't, or won't, put two and two together on their lifestyle and commuting. They're inherently linked!
A rail system, no matter how fast and efficient, can never get close to matching that.
Sure you can find plenty of random places it would take longer for me to get to by train, but for places I actually want to get to, the subway is faster.
I live in the DC area which has an excellent Metrorail system, and it is still nowhere near close enough to being able to replace the average trip by car unless you in DC proper.
Now imagine how much worse things would be in Houston.
Spoiler: All of them should be this way
Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Note that NYC itself used to be even more dense than it is today. No other U.S. city is likely to reach even NYC's current density in any near- to medium-time scale.
Nope: One need only wait for the financial collapse that is fast approaching nearly every municipality in the US due to the relative scale of infrastructure buildout + maintenance as compared to its tax base.
The "standard" American city is 100% unambiguously completely financially impossible.
This is obscured by the fact that cities traditionally account for their infrastructure as depreciating assets whose value goes to zero rather than as perpetual liabilities with exponentially increasing maintenance costs, where the expected maintenance burden of a road already far exceeds its "asset value" on day one of its creation (when it's added to the city's balance sheet as "an asset.")
The American sprawl pattern is financially impossible.
Nice snark though!
It costs money which taxpayers don't want to pay (unless it benefits them personally,) it requires long term planning which governments are incapable of, and it smells like socialism.
And it could be made ineffective as regional expansion continues. As soon as enough people who are willing to pay the toll saturates capacity you end up with the same issue (“just one more lane bro”). I see this all the time in the DC metro area’s toll express lanes that often save no significant time.
Another effective way to control highway congestion is to get people off of highways and invest in your transit system, make it better than driving so that people don’t drive as often.
But maybe Houston is too far gone for that.
For comparison, the Chicago red line extension project adds 5 miles of heavy rail for about twice the cost, so 4x more per mile. But the Houston toll lane project doesn’t do anything positive for adjacent property values like new rail stations do. Chicago will get money back from more property taxes and the new stations will relieve traffic on the Dan Ryan.
Transit lines get faster as ridership increases due to the ability to increase schedule frequency, the exact opposite of highways.
I am not saying Houston should magically turn into 1800s-era urban fabric but maybe some decent park and ride commuter transit would be a start? There are cities in Texas with 6 figure populations that have NO public bus system.
Increase the toll prices to reduce congestion, increase the number of buses on that route, and use some of the money for either expanding the road or building another more-or-less parallel road.
This stretch of road is already using congestion/dynamic pricing. I've never had to go slower than 85mph the entire way.
It’s like Disney World. They can fill the parks with people willing to pay $200 a day for tickets alone. If you can’t afford it then it doesn’t matter that other people get to get in.
Highways just don’t scale well. Two train tracks can move about the same number of people as 15 lanes of highway.
[1]the kind who have so few problems that freeway proximity makes it high on the list of things that inform where they choose to live
Light rail has been there since before the toll lanes.
This is not a small medical center, some of the hospitals are skyscrapers.
Houston’s red line has similar ridership levels to Chicago’s third busiest L line.
The two metro areas have a very similar population.
In Houston the rail does not actually extend to any suburbs, if they have that in Chicago it would probably make a big difference.
I got the idea when they were building it in Houston that a large bit of the Metro system is geared toward transporting people in lower-income areas who can't afford cars, so they can gain employment downtown and in the med center.
When it comes to toll roads most suburbs have a long-established freeway commute, but directly west from downtown a major suburb is known as the International District containing a large concentration of immigrants. The only traffic solution leading in that direction was built as a tollway instead.
It all started with the Beltway 8 toll bridge with toll that was cheaper than the gas saved by taking alternate routes.
By now the toll road authority has expanded and embraced a growth mindset for so long, and in recent years gotten so expensive, that any upcoming candidate for County Judge may be able to prevail on a single-issue of lowering the tolls alone.
This is how most US cities view public transit: poor people only.
Only a handful of US cities treat it as something that everyone uses, places like NYC, Chicago, DC, and Boston.
Houston should have an equivalent to the Metra or MBTA commuter rail.
...so I have a trailer hitch ball hung entirely across my plate — not considered "obstructing view" de jure, but YMMV (depending on officer).
Tennessee does not issue license plates for most trailers, either, so you can easily & even more legally conceal your license plate when towing.
Anything else that obstructs the view is illegal (including bicycle racks, leaves, dirt, lenses). But not trailers & hitch balls.
And in the absence of these congestion fees we’d likely have to take taxes overall. That would probably be even worse for poor people.
Also trains/subways are obviously another non-road transport option.
An issue is that it's set up as a regular loan, which the collected toll repays. So over the lifetime of the loan, often more than half is interest. Add administration costs and in some cases the actual money spent on the road is a small fraction of the total toll paid.
That said, in principle I think it's fair to have some use-based pricing. Same goes for public transportation. Studies have shown it's not ideal to have free public transportation, but rather a low fare.
That’s the only idea that makes sense to me.
The ones in the cities have a tendency to stay though, as they find new infrastructure projects to finance.
There's a YT channel where a guy exposes these. He found that one of the most common group of offenders in NYC was ... cops and their personal vehicles.
You can still throw them way off giving directions if you tell them to get off the freeway at Frontage Road, especially with a French Cajun accent ;)
Loads of exits in all locations and directions have a lone sign at the ramp simply saying "Frontage Rd." pointing at the exit.
You have to look at a sign miles earlier to know what exit it really is.
We have that problem here in Germany. The roads aren't just slow - the people living in the towns these roads run through are going through hell because they are affected massively. Can't safely cross the road, emergency response vehicles take ages, an insane amount of noise and emissions (because vehicles near idle make much more toxic exhaust when at low load and thus temperature), more brake and tire dust... Austria was fed up years ago, Bavaria recently followed suit [1].
[1] https://www.adac.de/der-adac/regionalclubs/suedbayern/news/a...
I don't agree. Price "discrimination" for government services is not acceptable. The perverse incentives that sets up are far too strong and the profits too juicy to avoid corruption.
We have historical analogs (paying for fire service and the corruption that caused in Rome). We have modern analogs (money from marijuana funding police forces that then arrest marijuana offenders and fight legalization efforts).
Letting price discrimination enter government services is simply a road to corruption and disaster.
The best transit systems are the ones that are almost fully subsidized with a token payment that doesn't price discriminate. We have strong examples of the problems with price discrimination in water (the entire American Southwest). Electricity "markets" gave us Enron and semi-privatized electric companies are currently giving us shutdowns because they are liable for causing fires--neither of these would be an issue if electricity is a flat market based on usage without price discrimination.
Everything you mentioned used to be what we called a "utility" and was the job of government to provide, oversee and generally subsidize. It was only since about 1980 that governments started trying to "privatize" these kinds of things with the magical thinking that somehow "profit incentive" would magically make them cheaper to run.
Yes, usage above and beyond basic levels was generally paid for at "point of use"--especially if the resource was limited (see: water). However, that payment needs to be somehow "metered" and with pricing that rises significantly as usage moves further from baseline in order to disincentivize over-consumption.
In the case of tolls (which started this discussion), that means the baseline price should be set to "damage incurred" which is "fourth power of weight" (if I remember correctly). Cars should be a low price; brodozers should pay significantly more than cars; loaded semis should pay a lot more. Adjust as necessary based upon time and load in order to manage traffic.
By linking to something directly meterable, you avoid the perverse incentives where the poor get disproportionately hit and the rich simply ignore everything (see: Nestle pumping water out of aquifers).
Toll roads are the worst. The fact that there are increasing numbers of them is as much a bellwether of the death of the American experiment experiment as anything else.
Despite the bad press, a well run government highway is much cheaper, generally 30% or more of that toll goes directly to maintaining the system and it's profits, there's more efficient funding methods out there.
They're natural monopolies, they fill up with traffic regardless of how much you rip people off.
And the excess revenue can be used to subsidize transit.
Tax what you want less of, subsidize what you want more of.
But consciously, at least where I live. There are definitely optional non-toll routes around me. Toll roads come at a financial cost to offset a time cost. Non-toll roads come at a greater time cost vs financial cost. If someone chooses to use a toll road regardless of their personal financial circumstances because the value to them is worth the time savings…so be it.
If a toll road becomes public, its value goes away because traffic increases on it, eliminating any benefit of traffic reduction that provides time savings that the gate keeping of the charging a toll provides. Also this notion of “everyone now bears the cost of the road” creates damage. That cost now hits the folks who don’t want to use it currently because they do not see its value. All you have done is hurt both the drivers of the road and the drivers who do not use the road by “sharing the burden” and making it public.
That's where the shift in burden to the poor so the rest can have shorter commute comes from. If everyone had the same opportunity cost to use the toll road then it wouldn't have the shift in burden as much as a pure shift in utility. Of course it doesn't have the same opportunity cost, so who benefits from the toll road is more slanted than who benefits from the public road. Whether or not the shift of burden is acceptable/ideal is a matter of opinion on public policy, but it's there.
Sure they are, tolls regulate the amount of traffic on a toll road and should hopefully decrease congestion and improve travel time. Eliminate the tolls, you will gain more traffic, more congestion, and more travel time. This will diminish its utility in that regard and it becomes yet another congested path.
> If everyone had the same opportunity cost to use the toll road then it wouldn't have the shift in burden as much as a pure shift in utility
Not that sure that a Marxist-style “equity” argument is all that convincing here. There is no huge mass public benefit here in eliminating an existing toll road. Your only true benefliciaries of this change are those people 1) who have to go from point A to point B, 2) need to arrive somewhat sooner than they do now (and can’t leave any sooner to get there) and 3) cannot afford the toll to get there faster under any circumstance.
Seems like that’s a pretty small subset of folks. Everybody else probably falls into 2 basic categories. Those willing to pay the toll to get there sooner—-but they lose the time benefit in your world. Those not willing to pay to get there sooner—but they now get the privilege for paying for a road they were choosing to not pay for before. Seems to me the bulk of the affected, lose.
Bear in mind, I am only arguing against the elimination of existing toll roads. Public infrastructure needs are what they are and region planners should make best efforts to deliver reliable and reasonable road infrastructure for its population. However, there is no doubt that toll roads can help improve overall transportation needs. So if a beneficial road can be created sooner if its costs can be offset via toll vs. waiting until public money is available to fund the construction, I think there is value to be explored there.
I cannot imagine that this is the best way to fund roads.
Then when you forget, which you 100% will if you’re not dealing with it frequently, or just reasonably assume they’ll send you a bill—ta-da! First communication they send is a nastygram assessing an extra $50 for every toll you forgot to go beg to pay when you got home.
Ingenious way to screw non-locals, and no toll plazas needed!
This is also causing problems with people using fake plates and magnetized plates. There's an entire growing industry around it. We're going to have to eventually start requiring some kind of transponder that repeats your plate number for sensors that can't be trivially covered... or you know... just raise the gas tax.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQZ2WkX...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rh9rcJe2nDz5Hnkv7?g_st=ic
You’re photo doesn’t show the metering that happens in the opposite direction.
I have thrown coins into a bucket in at least 15 years.
"pay by toll"
These are still toll roads, just a more modern iteration. Toll road ≠ physical cash
Besides, since about 10 years ago, we also have a lot of automated toll roads where you don't even need to have the Via Verde chip now. You just pass by, it collectes your car plate number and it processes the payment for you. Then it's your responsability to check your inbox for the bill (or to set it up to pay automaticaly).
The longest toll road still has (automated) barriers to stop at though - the M6 Toll.
Determining who pays to maintain these systems is a political decision, but it certainly makes sense that we should really be charging people who use them. Adding a luxury tax to folks who want to skip traffic seems like a free lunch for everyone else. At the end of the day, suburbanites want to force the rural and urban dwellers to subsidize their primary mode of transportation (large, dense highways), but it's becoming more and more politically untenable.
I think the most important thing to think about here, is how this affects long term real estate values and development patterns. Regardless of whether there are tolls or a higher gas tax, the current suburban development pattern is going to get more and more expensive for the end users, but you could have learned that from Strong Towns a decade ago.
We incentivize density in this country by having a ton of compliance hoops that increase cost on a per-building basis. People might just decide that they love suburbs so much that they vote for politicians who tell the Strong Towns crowd, the environmentalists and the trades and engineering groups to shove it and we go back to the 1980s and slap up street after street of chap AF single family homes on septic with nary a site plan in site.
Sure, but the point of a regressive vs. progressive tax is who bears the brunt.
If fewer people drive, and more take the train, how is the state compelled to shift funding?
This is one of the hard problems of politics, and it’s one of the reasons markets have been successful, but most people entirely ignore it.
Again, the point of the article is that we already do not have enough budget for road infrastructure, and the roads are already significantly subsidized by federal highway spending. Any solution of “more taxes on wealth and earnings” is theoretically doable, but practically very difficult. Taxing use seems entirely reasonable.
> Taxing use seems entirely reasonable.
If by use you mean 18-wheelers, then by all means, tax away. I am pretty sure highways would last for decades with a minimum of maintenance if there were no large trucks on them.
I mean, this is magical thinking. Yes, weight should be taxed, but the vast majority of states restrict trailers to the rightmost lanes. You can see the extra wear and tear. That doesn’t mean that autos aren’t contributing non-trivially.
As truck taxes rise, more of that freight will move to rail, so it’s not an infinite tax base.
Going to need a citation for that, because it seems the wealth(ier) and/or business-classes would bear the most significant burden of toll roads.
Typically, in my experience, tolls are assessed at boundaries of cities, regions, and intra-region/city transit is toll-free.
Businesses that use the toll road (think trucking/freight, etc) pay tolls because they come from outside of the boundary. Wealthier individuals may commute into the boundary for work, also paying tolls.
One can live inside the city of San Francisco and never pay a toll - but someone that lives outside and commutes in for work or business pays tolls every day.
Other states, such as Illinois have a vast amount of toll roads - where tolls are trivial (typically) but also still only assessed at boundaries. The roads are often much more well maintained than government roads, since the toll collector has a direct financial interest in maintaining traffic on the roads.
Because there is no consequences for the peddlers or the supporters.
You wouldn't take seriously someone who advocates with a straight face for reinstating prohibition or segregation yet it's perfectly socially acceptable to say "no, it will be different this time".
It's not just toll roads. You see this with every recurring bad thing.
It doesn't seem practical to charge tolls at every onramp.
It's also partially owned by outside investment (specifically the skyway from Indiana)
Toll roads are often not within dense urban cities - usually on the outskirts, suburbs, highways, bridges and more. Public transit simply doesn't work in these places because of how large and spread-out the US is.
Before all these massive road developments it’s not like people just sat at home and couldn’t go anywhere.
The US is huge. There is no feasible way to support public transit for 95%+ of it's land-mass. That's not going to change anytime soon, or ever.
Also, most mass-transit systems in the US operate at significant loss, even with government (ie. taxpayer) funding and collecting rider-fare. A lot of public transit systems are in complete disrepair and are severely lacking. Buses and lightrails are never going to be "cheaper", as convenient or accessible as roads and vehicles are.
Perhaps it is indeed infeasible today because of differences in economics and regulation, but: We already created it once -- for huge areas.
As evidence supporting the notion of this prior existence, I'd like to introduce this 1908 map entitled Electric Railway Map of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan: https://curtiswrightmaps.com/product/electric-railway-map-of...
(Those lines were real, and they were also generally privately-funded.)
The US is not unique in having fully adopted cars and ripped up old PT networks. It happened all over Australia which is also a massive very spread out country. But significant effort has gone in to reversing the damage.
There is something deeply wrong about a society that can afford to create hundred billionaires but can’t afford busses.
In my country, there were several "scandals" (altough I don't think anyone ever got arrested) about highway construction and how they massively went over budget. I can also say that when they are new, they are great to ride, but, since the budget only thinks about construction, after a couple of decades they start degrading badly until a new massive budget is again used for major work on them.
1. Women do not find guys in tiny cars to be attractive
2. Cars in America are becoming an arms race in terms of danger to others (tall front grills, heavier)
3. Liability/Regulation is too low. We'd see safety go up if we made the minimum insurance $5M , instead of $30000. Also if our police actually enforced traffic laws, including tags and insurance.
The US has converged because we are trapped in a vicious cycle.
Because, I mean, we did see something similar to that with the pandemic and a mass shift in perspectives on work culture, which corporations had to fight mightily to hobble. You also saw a similar shift during the Great Depression, and it took banks literal generations to rebuild their reputation with the public. In both cases, you saw massive ramifications for the way in which people lived.
I do think that no auto bailouts in 2008 ends America's love affair with the car as we knew it. So, yes, fewer cars. Or maybe, at least, different cars.
This isn't a compelling alternative future theory at all.
This is despite urbanization being lower then than it is now[1]. Some of that is because Americans became wealthier and demanded private alternatives to mass transit, but a lot of it is because we chose, as policy, to deprioritize effective mass transit.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
A large, spread-out community? Perhaps not so much.
But a small town where 80% of the people commute to surrounding cities? That'd be a great case for 1 or more commuter train, depending on direction and demand.
But even then if the train is hourly you need to be organized. No going out ona whim.
I believe it's called motorbike or scooter. Very popular in Asia.
Citation needed. I have been to many cities where I would never drive a car, but public transport is fine.
And then people invariably talk about theft or getting beat up, forgetting that most car accidents don't kill, they injure. And they're extremely expensive.
Cars might FEEL safer because you're in a little box away from everyone else. But it's the exact same everyone else. Still the same amount of crazies and sociopaths.
Except now, they're also in little steel boxes that weight 2,000 pounds going faster than any human was ever meant to go. And they're in full control.
Rich people pay the tolls without a second thought. For the poor they are yet another obstacle to trying to make ends meet.
The dominant automobile oriented transportation system is very unaffordable and requires high costs of entry. The best thing we can do to make transportation more affordable in general is giving people more options aside from the car. Taxing the wealthy in order to raise revenue for public transportation and active transportation options dominates any sort of regressiveness issues around road tolls and less traffic makes buses more effective.
Wait until you hear about the true costs of transit. A transit ride in a large city is typically MORE expensive than a car ride. Even when you take into account the cost of depreciation, insurance, financing and other related expenses.
The transit ticket price in the US is typically covers just around 15-20% of the _operational_ _cost_ ("farebox recovery rate"). And the capital costs for transit are off the charts. Seattle is going to pay $180B (yes, that's "B" for "billion") for about 20 miles of new lines. And for one mile of subways in Manhattan, you can build 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway.
It's THE real reason we have a failing democracy. Thoughtless social experiments with subsidizing transit have led to distorted housing and job markets. You can't just subsidize one facet of life and hope for it to work.
I suggest looking at Germany and the rapid ascendance of the AFD. And then looking at real estate prices in Berlin.
And it's the main reason for polarization. You have large cities (SF, Seattle, Chicago, NYC) that are the centers of economic growth, and you have thousands of small cities that are slowly dying. These large cities and their satellites are growing at an unsustainable rate, even though the _overall_ population is flat.
And then the cities themselves, they have a huge population of low-income workers who can't afford to live there without some form of subsidies. It started with transit, but now the freaking NYC mayor is talking about subsidized grocery stores. This is another source of polarization.
Want to see an even starker example? Look at Japan. Tokyo is in a literal housing price bubble in a country with a _shrinking_ population.
> Tokyo is in a literal housing price bubble in a country with a _shrinking_ population.
> Also, Japan effectively has zero NIMBYism due to a national building code. New housing is constantly being built in Tokyo.
Yup. It's a great example of why "just build more" leads only to misery.
> Yes, overall, the population is shrinking in Japan. However, the population of Tokyo continues to rise.
Thank you for making my point.
I don't see this. The cost of a month pass on new york subway is $130 a month. That is less than my monthly parking fee in sf
Also worth noting that comparing capital costs of underground transit to above ground private travel is pretty apples and oranges. Buses would be fairer comparison IMO.
There are several ways you can look at it. The easiest way is to divide the opex budget by the ridership. E.g. MTA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Transportation_Au... ) had a $19B budget in 2023 for 1.15B rides, resulting in about $16 per ride. Assuming conservatively 60 rides a month, that's $960 a month for transit in NYC. Without any capital expenses taken into account.
The average total car cost in the US in 2023 was around $1000 a month ( https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-it-cost-to-own-a... ). And this includes _everything_, including the capital cost.
> Also worth noting that comparing capital costs of underground transit to above ground private travel is pretty apples and oranges. Buses would be fairer comparison IMO.
Buses don't scale for large cities.
And a bus will waste the time of 49 people while stopping to load/unload just one person. Mild carpooling (think: a van for 3-5 people) can work.
Longer term, work from home for most jobs will eliminate the need for high-capacity transit. Outside of special use-cases like sports areans.
E.g. $5 for a 30 min trip and a change or $20 for a 15 min trip direct taxi experience.
If the road is a bottleneck optimising for usage it may let buses have a fast lane and the difference is less.
> If the road is a bottleneck optimising for usage it may let buses have a fast lane and the difference is less.
Ha. The dirty little secret of bus lanes is that they don't work as people think they do. They don't reduce the overall aggregated travel time (the sum of commute time for all the people traveling the route) in most cases. Instead, they force people out of cars by reducing the car throughput.
The commute time for each person who is forced out of their car typically becomes longer. As is commutes for the people in cars that now have to navigate more congested roads.
If you’re saying subsidized transit increases local quality of life, leading to higher demand, sure. But the cost itself has nothing to do with housing prices. Property taxes do not make mortgages more expensive. (Wouldn’t it have the opposite effect, high property taxes making houses harder to afford and therefore decreasing demand?)
Or is it that subsidized road systems don’t work? The pure miles of a system are completely irrelevant. Transit systems are meant for high density areas, costing more but covering less ground. The cost of tunneling under a mile Seattle for a road is absolutely more expensive than building a mile of highway in the middle of nowhere.
What the fuck are you on about re:democracy? “Thoughtless social experiments” are pretty far from the truth there. Democracy gets ruined by political parties unwilling to hold their own members accountable and by allowing corporations to exert more political power than human beings.
Well. Look at your two statements again. Now think about this, what would have happened if Seattle didn't have buses and light rail? And didn't permit new dense office space as a result?
> If you’re saying subsidized transit increases local quality of life, leading to higher demand, sure.
It DECREASES the quality of life. It promotes crime and inequality.
> Or is it that subsidized road systems don’t work?
In most states, drivers already pay most of the cost of road maintenance through direct taxes/fees: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... Absolutely no state has unsubsidized transit.
Meanwhile, we're barreling toward 2-3 C of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Oh, sorry, that doesn't have a line item on the toll receipt, silly me.
>It's THE real reason we have a failing democracy. Thoughtless social experiments with subsidizing transit have led to distorted housing and job markets. You can't just subsidize one facet of life and hope for it to work.
Lol. Lmao, even.
Money is a pretty good proxy for CO2. So the carbon footprint of large cities is unsustainable.
The most eco-friendly model? Low-density semi-rural areas, with EV-based infrastructure, with sane-sized cars (not SUVs).
I can see it being both ways.
Land aside, building a single story house is much cheaper per sq ft than a tower.
Medium density streets, like UK terraces can have enough density to support commerce nearby etc. but also low enough density to use a lot of solar to power houses directly.
Land may be the constraint given the population of the world.
Though there are few clear cut real world examples to point to because land use is one of the most highly politicized things and it is rarely exposed to real market forces.
It's a great thing to have arguments about because whenever you can point some examples, people will always nitpick at why it's not real (eg. Tokyo is affordable and dense thanks to low regulation and the market, but people will point at the relatively poor Japanese economy etc).
But from basic geometric principles it makes sense that automobile oriented infrastructure is ultimately unsustainable and more expensive because of the constraints of the real world.
Ultimately the issue one runs into is that a car is a box several feet wide by several feet long (6.7x17.4) for an F150. That's a lot of space both parked and on the road. So if everyone buys one (and largely drives around themselves) it's clear that one quickly fills up the size of the road. The cost of expanding roads is very expensive, disruptive, and occasionally impossible. And then it doesn't even really work in remarkably improving traffic because due to Induced Demand, it reprices driving cheaper, which encourages more people to drive, which refills the road again. Everyone's time is being wasted sitting in these large boxes that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
So the core problem is that cars are enormously space inefficient. The system simply doesn't scale and eventually reaches break down.
You simply have to give up and can't grow the city any further. So you have to push people out to other cities.
But if we think of moving people instead of cars, there's a lot more space efficient opportunities since people are very small.
So you look at things like a bicycle, whose costs are relatively near nil, a protected bike lane that is also effectively near nil (put some jersey barriers on an existing road) and you can move that same person for much less. Obviously the problem is that they can't go very far but a combination of different modes for different uses and you have a system that can actually scale.
Build compact mixed use neighbourhoods that one can walk and bike to for local needs, buses for inter neighbourhood, and trains for intra and inter city long distance travel.
Only with this approach can you can continue to scale a city and continue to have a large city that is functional.
Houston, TX is the same population as NYC. Except that it has faster commutes and vastly better housing cost (especially on a per sq.ft. basis).
So we KNOW that sanely-designed people-oriented cities like Houston can scale.
This is the relief valve I mentioned here:
> You simply have to give up and can't grow the city any further. So you have to push people out to other cities.
So a city that can sprawl like Houston, does so, and it grows outward, adding more cities on the edge and becomes effectively a loose federation of many cities, which aids in the transportation issue.
That is a solution that some cities on a plain can make use of to kick out the runway further, but it's unavailable to others with more constrained geography.
E.g. density doesn't decrease housing prices: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...
The CO2 footprint question is a tricky one. The vehicle _itself_ is not the main source of pollution. Even if you compare the vehicles, the answer is not straightforward: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint The main source of pollution for transit are _drivers_. E.g. each bus needs around 3 drivers to function, resulting in driver-to-passenger ratio of just around 1:7.
So when computing true CO2 footprint, you need to look at a counter-factual scenario where bus drivers are doing something else. But this becomes extremely tricky extremely fast, as you can move into fantasyland where bus drivers are building CO2 scrubbers instead of driving CO2-emitting vehicles. Or where drivers are working on chopping forests for agricultural lands, resulting in huge CO2 increases.
The next best option is to look at different regions and compare them. E.g. Houston, TX with EVs would have smaller CO2 emissions than the current NYC, with climate corrections.
The article you cited doesn't support that assertion. Its thesis is that upzoning alone — i.e. relaxing regulations such that it is legal to build higher-density housing, without further interventions — may not be sufficient to create enough vacancies to lower rents.
And you need a state-driven corrupt system of subsidies for socialized housing to make it "affordable". For the right kinds of people.
Could you quote a passage that supports your interpretation?
The cited article alone simply admits that upzoning won't result in cheaper housing. Because the market is broken (and only socialized housing can fix it), but we must do upzoning anyway.
No, it's not. Because for that to work, you'll need a large underclass that has to waste 2-3 hours a day in commutes and subsist on groceries from state-run stores.
But yeah, the elites will be able to live in nice walkable areas. I know, I lived in an apartment overlooking the Union Square in Manhattan.
Who says "the Union Square?"
The area is great and walkable, with tons of restaurants around. But of course, nobody working in these restaurants can afford to live anywhere close to it.
> Who says "the Union Square?"
What's wrong with that?
Maybe EVERYTHING shouldn't BE "constant prices". Maybe where there are practical alternatives to constant pricing, those should be preferred and used.
> Charging $10 for a t-shirt is regressive.
No. Not unless there is only 1 type of t-shirt in the world available. If I'm poor I can go find cheaper t-shirts either less stylish, poorer quality, from a generic brand, from a discount retailer, second-hand (used), packaged in bulk, etc., or maybe wait around for a sale on the t-shirt.
Tolls are a regressive tax on the working class. The rich don't even need to use the roads as much because they have other people delivering for them. When they need the road system, the tolls are nothing to them.
The working class, which are generally required to be driving to survive, are left holding the bag for tolls. In places with bad public transit, tolls are just a forced wealth transfer from working class to private firms managing the tolls.
Why should I pay the toll to drive to a friend's house? They're the one getting the benefit out of having easy access to transportation.
What if my taxes pay for all the roads in my town, while the neighboring town chooses to implement tolls instead? Why should I get double-taxed? Prisoner's dilemma and race-to-the-bottom?
Why should I have to deal with having my license plate stolen, and police time wasted (who are paid out of taxes), because of people who don't pay the tolls?
Fee-for-service city parks? Public libraries? Fire departments? Sidewalks? What about investing in the "public good"?
Why? That doesn’t seem like a good way to run society.
The very well-known in Germany satiric news website "Der Postillion" had an interesting provocative piece just yesterday (German, but auto-translate takes care of that): https://www.der-postillon.com/2023/12/weihnachtsmann-ungerec... -- "Schlimmer Verdacht: Bevorzugt der Weihnachtsmann die Kinder reicher Eltern?" ("A disturbing suspicion: Does Santa Claus favor the children of wealthy parents?")
Being able to get to places by car is one of the most basic needs in the US. I think it leads to cementing the monetary status quo and monetary class affiliation when that becomes even more dependent on how much money one can spend on it. A nicer car being more expensive is fine in that regard, it does not get you from A to B much or any faster than the cheap one. Being able to choose roads or lanes that will take you there much faster is different.
It removes one's personal "hard work" contribution to success if more and more of it is out of your control - after all, how much money you start the game of life with is nothing one has control over. Maybe making that kind of mechanism worse is not the best idea in the long term. Unless we are really aiming for what all the dystopia movies and anime have been showing us.
There are also tons and tons of indirect effects. For example, I would make the claim that wealthy shareholders benefit a lot more from roads than poor people, even when they don't drive, since the companies they own and the entire economy needs them. The poorer people driving to work "paying their share" does not look so clearly justified to me, unless one believes that their salaries are perfect indications of their role in value creation.
Canadian stand-up comedian Casually Explained (I don't actually know if he stands up to record his videos) had basically the same joke a few days before them.
We have removed all tolls here in Nova Scotia,including for small car ferry's , were not rich or populous,but are building out our infrastructure bit by bit to facilitate ease of transport and the prevention of accidents and traffic jams. The other thing they added are info signs accross the main hyways comming in, giving times for the main transit routes, making it easy to redirect , 45 MIN!, yikes! sounds like coffee and grocerie shopping to me! It has realy made a huge difference getting around the city and has opened up options for travelling rural routes that have ferries.
What's the problem with that? It's an opt-in tax. Also if it's without a second thought then i'd suggest the price is a touch too low.
At least in theory, this means the toll lane accomplishes the same total road throughput, but shifts the entire cost of its construction to its users instead of depleting public funds. It then appears regressive, but is arguably progressive.
During covid the IRS sent everyone a check. No reason this also can't work at a state level and just have toll funds sent out as checks to lower income brackets.
If there is low cost public transit available, then a toll could be an incentive to use public transit instead of driving. But if there is no other viable transportation option, then it is effectively just a regressive tax.
Only if there is no other way for them to get from point A to point B. If there is, it’s a time vs $ value question to the driver and not regressive, nor an “obstacle”—it’s simply a decision.
Thus entirely defeating the point of taxing it in the first place.
If you want less driving, make it more expensive. Yes, some people will be in unfortunate situations where they can't afford it, but that's the point.
"You could say they are a flat tax since every driver pays the same per usage. You could even argue it is a progressive tax since richer people use toll roads more. The only way you CAN'T describe a toll is a regressive tax. Words have meaning."
A toll is absolutely regressive because the burden it imposes is constant, irrespective of income; poorer individuals will pay a proportionally higher percentage of their income than wealthier counterparts. As income increases the "effective rate" asymptotically approaches zero, which is regressive by definition.
We had a proxy for that via gasoline taxes but with EV becoming more common we need to find a replacement for that revenue.
Heavier users aren't causing the damage though. Heavy vehicles like busses and semi's cause the most damage.
if you're trying to pay for wear and tear on the roads, or reduce congestion, making people feel like they have to "get their moneys worth" on the registration surcharge really isn't helping.
It sounds like this is actually close to what you would be expected to use.
Not even close to what the average driver drives.
And it's an EV, a closer comparison should be something more like a hybrid. It's not a giant truck.
Meanwhile that base model equivalent weight F150 gets about 24mpg and thus pays about half as much gas tax while doing the same amount of damage driving the average mileage. Further proving my point, I pay twice the state fuel tax for an equivalent weight pickup truck. Is that fair?
But also, isn't the whole point of the pickup truck to load it down? If all it's doing is carrying 1-4 people it's whole life, seems like a lot of waste. I'm told people buy trucks to actually load them down a lot and not just commute and get groceries? So while it's about the same weight dry and unloaded shouldn't it's weight really be quite a bit more in practice? Or are we all agreeing now trucks are just for commuting and getting groceries?
55 miles/day, 365 days a year? Also, look at lease mileage limits.
If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off.
Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...
If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off.
Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...
When you look at taxation from a "charge the people who use it" or the "the rich should pay more" perspective, this appears to address both.
Is the problem simply that you want to pay less taxes?
If it was, it would be based on vehicle weight and distance driven. Where I am, at least, it's simply a tax on efficiency.
Paying 3x the same taxes while having less externalities isn't fair.
> With that information, the British newspaper calculated that BEVs [battery electric vehicles] could expose roads to 2.24 times more damage than gas cars.
Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...
If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car in the externalities of road wear & tear.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" is at most 25% higher in a "damage per mile equivalent" but could be as little as 6% using the averages.
If your actual mileage is over 15625/year, then you're paying less than the equivalent.
What's your annual mileage?
According to your link, an EV that is 700lb heavier => 2.24x damage
Civic: ~2900lb SuperDuty: ~5700-7600lb
I understand the point you're trying to make - and you may be right - but you're leaving out the math to demonstrate it.
+700lb (+25%) => 2.25x damage +2800lb (+100%) => ???x damage
Your story doesn't provide a formula, but seems obvious it is much, much greater than 2 - this isn't a linear relationship
And that's the very lightest SuperDuty model, unloaded.
Not sure where you are but in Indiana, gas tax for unleaded is 36c while diesel is 62c so on a per-gallon basis, that's an additional +72% in taxes. Back of the envelope: Civic at 30mpg pays 1.2c/mile vs SuperDuty at 15mpg pays 4.13c/mile so the multiple is closer to 3.4 vs 2
So yes - assuming registration fees are comparable and mileage is comparable - the SuperDuty should pay more.
By the fourth power law, an unloaded diesel Superduty creates ~22x the road wear of a honda civic. Loaded can be 100x more.
> If your actual mileage is over 15625/year, then you're paying less than the equivalent.
The average is less than that by a decent bit, so more than half of US cars are paying more even with your unproven, contorted math based on some estimates done once in the 70s and never really looked into closely again.
It's also assuming the difference in weight. The closest hybrid I would have bought instead is only like 100kg lighter than my EV. And it gets like 40mpg, better than 35mpg.
It would also mean semi trucks should pay like 20,000x more in registration fees. Does this make sense?
> What's your annual mileage?
Less than 15k on that car (like most people), so even with your assumed math it's overpaying.
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10308
Are you suggesting the average car burns less than 1 gallon of gas a year?
A 20mpg car driving 12,500mi (the average ICE in the US) would use 625gal of gas. So more like 20x, maybe 40x if the per gallon tax of diesel is double. Pretty dang far off from 20,000x.
And they're doing way more miles while being massively heavier, meaning incredibly more harm on the road than whatever EV you're thinking.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent>
(Most tractor-trailor rigs burn diesel rather than petrol.)
Do you have an alternative analysis? I'd love to check it out.
I do agree the relationship probably isn't linear, but the fourth power rule doesn't necessarily have numerous studies confirming it. It was a small collection of studies on road wear the US highway administration did in the 1950s and pretty much everyone has just gone with that. Other studies have pointed to it being less than previously thought.
https://discovery.ntroknowledge.com.au/discovery/fulldisplay...
Throwing even more weight against your 12,000mi is really 35,000mi equivalence.
Regardless, it would be interesting to see the actual number worked through to see what the equivalent EV registration fee should be if road damage/maintenance is the sole factor.
> that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off
You absolutely did suggest me paying taxes for 12k miles is practically the same as ~35k miles, you said it several times. That it's not far off. How else am I supposed to read that? You were so sure of it you mentioned it many times.
> Regardless, it would be interesting to see the actual number worked through to see what the equivalent EV registration fee should be if road damage/maintenance is the sole factor.
Sure, but it's likely far less than what I'm paying. As mentioned elsewhere, a similar weight unloaded F-150 pays half the taxes. So I'm at least paying double for similar weight vehicles, and yet you tell me it's really only 6%. But sure, tell me again how I'm really just paying my fair share and 12 = 35.
^ As you quoted, I used the formula to estimate 12k would be equivalent to 27k and said paying taxes equivalent to be 35k miles is "at most 25% higher", neither of which is "12 = 35". Using their approach, I calculated 35k to be equivalent to 15625 specifically, again, not 12k.
If the underlying approach is wrong, we should replace it with something better.
Alternatively, the OTHER reasoning of "the rich should pay more" still applies, so I assume that's a factor here. Hoping States charge rich people (or high income earners, if you prefer) less isn't likely to work right now.
Once again, your assumption is incorrect. That base model F-150 that pays half the taxes costs more than my EV. The registration fee doesn't factor in income or valuation at all. A $100k Hummer EV pays the same as a $15k used Bolt. Meanwhile that Hummer EV is going to do a hell of a lot more damage to the roads than the Bolt.
It probably has more to do with the government being in the pocket of oil interests and acts accordingly.
The people who can least afford to move closer to their jobs are the ones who are regressively taxed in time, energy, and money the most.
A proper solution would be to require more housing NEAR the jobs to make it easier for people to save time and money by moving closer.
I am speaking of most of America, where that is NOT happening because densification of areas is blocked by those already nearby who like the way suburbs near jobs are. (I don't blame them, apartments and probably condos SUCK, the building codes don't protect me from the choices of those nearby so everyone suffers the most annoyance.)
In effect, I am encouraging at least some of those nearby areas to experience zoning upgrades. Like in a city simulator when low density residential gets replaced with high, and mid and high rises replace older single family homes and suburbs.
Gas taxes also work (ignoring electric vehicles), but paying a specific amount for a specific road certainly seems more direct.
I think most people will just be burdened by it.
I think taxes would be a more efficient way of collecting these fees, and ensuring they go to fund mass transit in a way that traffic/pollution/road damage was mitigated directly and the people were still served.
Chicago is the poster child here. Constant rate hikes. Diverted funds meant to maintain the roads going elsewhere. "Temporary" tolls that become "permanent", etc.
It's bad, stop the madness.
With a side of handing off management and a slice of the revenue to private entities. With minimum revenue guarantees that then act as a disincentive to improving nearby roadways.
It's so clearly a net win for society and humanity to have open and available roads.
Aside from that if you want to tax me then just charge me more for a license plate. Don't stop me in the middle of driving to hustle me for a buck and some change. Utterly ridiculous management of the problem.
Meanwhile... private jets exist...
> More efficient economy, more citizen capabilities, better access for emergency and maintenance equipment.
congestion pricing literally improves every single one of those.
It’s just another form of rent seeking.
Now, gov run tolls seem like a good idea in areas where congestion needs to be managed. But also needs to be careful not to be a secret tax on the poor.
In order to implement tolls, you need several components involving middlemen. This includes frontend software, backend, payment processing, transponder management, all the hardware involved, support staff, sometimes toll station staff, among other things.
These toll companies are often owned by foreign companies that are in it for the long haul, offering sweet deals up front then gradually charging more and more with no end in sight, as roads diminish in quality and rest stops fall into disarray.
Toll roads are a scam, a regressive tax on the working class, and downright immoral. We should not limit the mobility of people.
Road management should be administered by federal and state agencies, including the administration of tolls when they are foolishly utilized. It should not be a for profit venture, it is a mechanism of taxation for public logistics.
It should not be possible to offload management to private orgs outside of very specific subcontracting / purchasing of components.
Instead, often times full road management is given to private orgs. They are not given a robust legal incentive to act in the interests of the road system, and how could they? They are interesting in using the road to maximize their profit, at the loss of everyone needing the road.
If you reg a secondary car’s plate to an ezpass account without using the transponder, a lot of states will just think it was a read fail and charge you the regular rate but it depends.
I think rationing is more fair and the only way to prevent massive outrage until maybe we have reduced the wealth gap to a large degree.
i don't know how to afford the 50 more lanes that most cities need though. I suggest better transit.
They are trying to widen the NJ Turnpike but the congestion isn't because 6 lanes aren't enough, the congestion is because the three Hudson crossings into Manhattan cannot ingest 6 lanes worth of traffic.
You can’t directly. If the comment goes negative, it get greyed out. (In many cases, people are complaining about a comment they like not being the top comment.)
Either way, complaining about the voting is against the guidelines and thus flaggable. That causes your comment to get marked as flagged.
> Other mechanisms like adding lanes just invite more cars and traffic is not relieved.
Of course just creating more supply when the cost to the consumer is basically 0 will just juice the demand to fit the new capacity. Tale as old as time.
That is the problem with them in the Netherlands. Building and maintaining roads is so frighteningly expensive that you can't price them to even cover the cost!
Creative revenue approaches sound efficient, but you don't want efficiency with spending. Efficiency means that spending will grow unabated.
In my state they've had record revenue for 12 years (until just lately). Regardless of each record, they continued to outspend revenue into a deficit.
Commercial enterprises are bounded by revenue (and debt). Public agencies used to have a feedback loop (losing the next election), but in many states there is little consequence for deficit spending.
Don't give spendthrifts more ways to spend money. They will always exceed the revenue they generate.
Regardless, 2 wrongs don’t make a right. Moreover, most of the public spending goes into what you would likely consider to be grifter enterprises.
If we're going to spend the money anyways why do we need private profits?
Furthermore, just tax the vehicles that are actually doing damage to the roads. i.e., trucks.
A honda civic barely does anything to a road. Where a semi-truck is EXPONENTIALLY more damaging.
Honda Civic weighs 0.7t per axle, or 0.24tttt of wear.
F-150 weighs 0.9t per axle, or 0.65tttt of wear.
A school bus weighs 7.5t per axle, or 3164tttt of wear. That's more than thirteen thousand Honda Civics' worth of road damage. Imagine the driver of the Honda had to pay 1c per mile. The school bus would have to pay $130 per mile. Yes, it's carrying 78 passengers, so the cost would be $1.67 per mile per student, but I think most people would just drive their kids to school.
The roads are already being paid for and maintained at their current state. All you'd be doing is making goods slightly more expensive and other taxes slightly less. About 1-4% of your total tax burden goes to the roads. That's a small enough total number to be easily buried among your annual spend on goods.
Like if roads were these huge financial burdens that didn't amortize away to practically nothing.
Similarly, a Honda Civic is ~360 million times more damaging to the road than a bicycle, according to the fourth power law.
No reasonable fee structure should let car drivers use roads for free.
And that's before we get into the amount of valuable public land car drivers use for personal storage.
Your point about semi-truck damage vs lighter vehicles is exactly why I think moving in that direction is so useful. The most fair taxation would accurately take both that aspect and actual miles driven into account.
Can I use the highway if I don’t have a car? (Barely)
Can I use it for anything non driving related (like a downtown street where lanes can be repurposed for outdoor seating)? No
I agree with you on what does the majority of the damage.
We're talking about 10 lane monstrosities, with 8 or more flyovers, standing 20 stories high in places like in Houston and Dallas.
Can I use the schools if I don't have a child?
The primary concern with not allowing access at any time of day to the general public is of course, the children.
There is one school that definitely is gated off, but that's because it's near a major point of interest and I can only assume they're worried about non-community members damaging the property.
Around here the grounds are not only open outside of school hours, but explicitly so (they have closing hours posted: 9PM).
Aside from a few things like some playgrounds shared with public parks next door this has often been pretty untrue. I've definitely had police escort me off school basketball courts when school isn't in session, the natatoriums haven't had much public access, it's not like the school libraries are open after hours, etc.
I'm sure some places are more open and some are less open, I wouldn't say you can "definitely" use them.
So is every park. What's the point of this language game?
And just in case this fact is being lost / forgotten: Toll roads are primarily, originally funded through tax dollars but are disingenuously structured in a way these bozos can go "see, it's not actually tax dollars" (it is). The same exact dollars that should be used to build fully public, free roads are instead used to privatize public infrastructure.
There has never been a time where a toll raid has failed and the losses were treated as private. The bonds magically get repaid (to the right people, of course).
It's all tax dollars in the end, one way or another.
Roads are clearly rivalrous and while it's often impractical to prevent non-payers from entering a toll road, one can certainly record them and met penalties after the fact to discourage it.
So no, roads are not a public good.
You’re both right. Roads can be an impure public good.
At low traffic loading, they are not rivalrous and can be modelled as a public good. At high traffic loading they become rivalrous and thus closer to a common-pool resource.
If roads are made excludable, they resemble a club or even private group.
This is untrue of all the toll roads I've regularly driven in multiple cities in the US. Their construction was funded through bonds which are paid back from the toll revenues.
The bonds are issued either by the authority itself or some other agency expressly delegated to issue those bonds.
The accounting is done EXPRESSLY with the knowledge of the states general fund, even though there's a "wink wink" don't use the tax dollars to """directly""" pay for these bonds.
Don't believe me? Look at the financial reports yourself.
There is zero point in the fuzzy accounting other than to make something that simply should be public, private, and allow grifters to make a buck or two off it.
In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.
If you have the money, investing in a toll road is the easiest way to make lots of money with 0 risk.
But you can only do that if the entity issues those bonds "knows" and "selects" you. :)
I have for the toll roads I drive on. It shows the debt payments being paid by the toll revenues, not other state taxes.
> In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.
Sure, the toll agencies are ultimately a creature of the state but it's incorrect (a lie?) to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars, at least for the toll roads I drive on. What's the rate of these failures? What's the actual percentage of these bonds being paid by toll revenues versus failing and the states being on the hook? Once again you said it's primarily and originally. Being paid because the bond failed to be paid back by toll revenues isn't the original payment plan, and unless it's happening most of the time it's not the primary way of those bonds being paid.
> make something that simply should be public, private
The toll roads I'm talking about are public.
> address this "viewpoint."
This "viewpoint" is otherwise known as "reality".
Link me so I can draw some circles for you.
> to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars
Do you know how bonds work? It's an isomorphic operation. A state entity is issuing bonds out to creditors. A lot of those major creditors will also be secured creditors.
It's the same thing, just covered under a sleight of hand trick.
So the state borrows money from a select few major creditors but it's "wink wink" not against the full faith and credit of the state, then regulates a consumption tax on the road, and the investors and authority get a slice of the pie.
For what purpose?
And when the toll roads fail either the creditors are paid out either through the state out right buying the road or allowing the debt to be a tax write off over X amount of time.
>This "viewpoint" is otherwise known as "reality".
This American brainworm is exhausting, ngl. Buddy you're getting bamboozled by a few vocab words and a 3 step accounting trick, please don't presume to talk to anyone about reality.
https://www.ntta.org/sites/default/files/2025-06/06-27-2025_...
> then regulates a consumption tax on the road
Yeah, the toll. One assumes you're not talking about the toll but other tax revenues when you're complaining about tax payers paying for the road. Obviously the tolls go to pay for the toll road, so what's the point otherwise about talking about the taxpayers paying for it?
Buddy it's really exhausting ngl having people always assume every toll organization is a private enterprise. It's not just a 3 step accounting trick, please don't presume you know how every toll arrangement is made.
And if your point is the idea of government bonds going to private investors, well, how do you think the freeways are financed? How does it make a difference then if it's a freeway or a toll road or a library or a playground? It's all financed in largely the same way. Government bonds issues to selected investors.
It has been proven many times it's cheaper for the government, and therefore tax payers, for the government to get a loan and build public highways themselves. yet, all new highways are private.
big corp get given the land for the roads and have builtin toll price increases. One company raises prices 4% every 6 months. According to google, that means the toll doubles every 9 years.
For me to drive 22km to the CBD via toll roads costs $25 one way, and I save 10 minutes most time of the day. In 10 years time, it will probably be around $40 one way.
big corp make a billion or two in profit every year.
It's no coincidence that the companies behind the expansion of US toll roads are mostly the Australian companies that run Sydney's toll roads: Transurban, Macquarie, IFM, ...
> Doesn't Sydney also have world class public transport infrastructure?
Toll roads do have real consequences and, do, raise the cost of everything that needs to travel over it. It also means things that could exist on one side of a bridge or tolled section will relocate to other areas to avoid tolls.
Not against them, but I also don't like them. I personally think it's a failure of a state managing its roads where the cost has to become disproporiationally spread.
No. I won't say they're rare but they're not especially common in the US.
Nowadays we have those boxes that we can put in the windshield that automatically bill us later. And that's made me far more willing to take a trip via the highway. Removes a lot of anxiety. And, so far, at least in my experience, they work.
earmark this money in a way that can't be siphoned and build public transportation with it. in addition buy fleets of buses with the cash that are exempt and analyze the destinations and origins of the traffic and put them there.
"Good news! Surge pricing is in effect, and today your commute will cost you twice the usual price!"
People who can defer traveling to avoid traffic jams and congestion already tend to do so. Sitting in traffic is boring, stressful, and a waste of time and money. People who don’t have a good reason not to.
You're right that people who can defer traveling to avoid traffic jams and congestion already tend to do so. But there are still people at the margin. People who don't value their time or don't mind sitting in traffic listening to the radio or dislike taking the bus. These people are creating congestion, imposting a cost on everyone else, and paying nothing for it. They would do it less if they had to pay. (It's okay for people to drive and sit in traffic, there's just no reason it should be free!) So it would really be more like "Good news! Surge pricing is in effect, and today your commute will cost you twice the usual price but take half as long!"
I'd say I've experienced far fewer "what is going on with this person and are they going to end up getting someone injured?" moments on public transportation than in cars.
I often see these comparisons to cars and theyre just so dishonest, because nobody seems to mention the number one downside of driving a lot. Maybe we're desensitized to it. Driving is a fantastic way to die, one of the best.
You aren't going to change congestion unless you fix the balance between throughput and volume. Dynamic pricing doesn't improve throughput, and it doesn't decrease volume- it just forces some of that volume onto less well equipped roads.
The volume on the tollway itself may decrease, but only because drivers suddenly need to take other roads that the tollway was designed to alleviate pressure from in the first place.
They are if you price it properly. If it costs $1000 to get on that road, a lot of people are going to find alternative means of transport, carpool, or forgo the trip entirely.
Los Angeles has many such examples, one recent and well studied one was the closure of the 10 freeway after a fire.
All of these factors and more affect demand for transportation.
Or, why not put the road tax on tires, which wear based on distance driven? I suppose that might get kind of high if you're paying $0.005 per mile and the tires are supposed to last 50,000 miles for a total of $250 for 4 new tires.
A lifestyle that requires burning large amounts of fuel just to buy groceries, or maintaining water-intensive lawns at scale, only works under very specific economic and environmental conditions. As those conditions disappear, cities have to adapt—even if the cultural shift feels uncomfortable at first.
And maybe you are, which, good on you! But I don't think most Americans are.
It's about getting away from "the wrong kind"[1] of people.
[1]calm down that's not who I'm talking about.
If you rely on businesses, services, emergency workers, etc., you rely on roads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... (“In 2021, state and local governments spent $206 billion, or 6 percent of direct general spending, on highways and roads. As a share of state and local direct general expenditures, highways and roads were the fifth-largest expenditure in 2021.”)
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/unpave-low-tra... (“The U.S. has 4.1 million miles of roads (1.9 million paved, 2.2 million gravel). About 3 million miles of roads have less than 2,000 vehicles a day, less than 15% of all traffic. The paved portion of these low-volume roads ought to be evaluated for their potential to be unpaved.”)
(very similar to how climate costs are causing agriculture and insurance costs to snap to reality, with similar sadness; debts coming due)
“Everyone wants civilization but nobody wants to pay taxes” is a hard concept to solve for, most especially when those with nothing or no tax liability (very roughly the bottom 60% of Americans) advocate for the wealthiest from a failed mental model.
If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more, then that is a separate problem fixed by redistributing more cash, so that the wealth gap is smaller.
Edit: to respond to reply about trucks causing more damage to road:
Construction costs are one cost of roads, but another cost is time cost due to congestion (and resulting effects of delays due to congestion). A variable rate toll that also incorporates congestion is the ideal way to manage road use, much like paying more for electricity or other resources at peak demand to modulate demand.
As a consequence, personal cars barely register.
It would make sense to collect toll from trucks only, and possibly weigh them all, because overloaded trucks are extra damaging to the road.
Probably, due to the small size of RI, it will just cause goods not bound directly for RI to divert along I-395 up through CT and MA, and I-290 and I-495 in MA.
We've ended up, though, with a growing wealth gap and more tolls.
Also higher gas taxes for carbon reasons.
Yep. It's great that I have to pay to use this stretch of I-90 and then on top of that if I end up at the wrong rest area on a Sunday I won't be able to access every vendor (because they picked Chick-Fil-A at some locations).
2. Fooled you! It's not getting better.
Nearly every toll (in NJ or surrounding states) is done via EZ Pass a/o license plate readers.
It’s nearly impossible to travel without being tracked.
As an outsider, to me the framing that USA is "car-oriented" was always off the mark. Cars are just a tool, which people would rather use as little as possible (I mean, who actually enjoys sitting in traffic or having a long commute?).
The real issue is the notion that everyone needs crazy amounts of space inside and a yard. I've found this calculator[0] that says that for my family I would need 2280 sq ft to "live comfortably", which to me is an absurd amount, as I live on a third of that and was only ever considering apartments with at maximum half the mentioned square footage.
You can't reasonably organise public transport over such a sparsely populated area. Over here we have districts of detached houses and they're notoriously difficult to get in and out of.
[0] https://themortgagereports.com/117403/average-home-size-in-t...
Driving a car imposes costs on everyone. It requires public infrastructure, pollutes the environment, endangers lives, etc.
Cars are a private privilege, and toll roads are a way to make people aware of that.
But I wonder how the country that hates socialism will see this privatization of costs.
Do I expect Americans to start thinking of making cities for people instead of cars? Will they begin taking public transportation seriously? No, they won't.
In the West, many cities are urban sprawls that built out instead of up, so public transit is less effective and car ownership rates are higher.
I wish LA or Phoenix or Vegas was dense living where public transit could be effective, but since they’re urban sprawls and public transit isn’t aa effective as a densely populated city, most people own cars to get around.
Contrast this with literally every other type of western public transport project going several times over budget, expensive to use and maintain and breaks down after a decade. I'm all for the idea, but that's the reality.
Source?
> Contrast this with literally every other type of western public transport project going several times over budget, expensive to use and maintain and breaks down after a decade.
Source?
People might actually not laugh at this when the government builds public transport, walkable cities, jobs within walk distance etc
- Congestion charge - $9 per day on Ez-Pass
- Bridge toll - $10 to $15 per day
If you want food, products, or services, you depend on the roads. This means it should be taxed universally and equitably. We should all contribute our fair share to maintain the roads.
Tolls are a regressive tax on low-income people who do the most to make society work, and it is unfortunate that more people do not see this. What's more, they are generally administered by corrupt and inefficient private for-profit orgs. This creates even more overhead which then costs more money.
These orgs generally have slimy deals with city and state governments, while directly profiting from public works that built the road system to begin with.
There are much better ways to fund the road system. Tolls are among the worst.
Business owners who pay the tax are free to raise their prices, which is how it's supposed to work. They're currently raising their prices because their drivers waste time in congested traffic and because they pay taxes to the government for road maintenance.
For an analogy, it also makes sense to tax companies who dump their waste in rivers, to the extent that their waste dirties the rivers. If there is some ultra-valuable product that could only be made by dirtying a river (idk, let's say that for some reason insulin had to be made that way), it would be a good that it could still be made, while discouraging people from dirtying rivers for little reason. No one would say "polluting the river should be free because we all use products that are made by polluting rivers." If polluting rivers were free and the government just taxed everyone to clean them up afterwards, we probably all really would use products made by polluting rivers! but that doesn't mean we would be worse off by taxing it directly.
That said, I agree that there's no reason for tolls to fund the road system. Hypothecated taxes are generally not a good idea, despite the fact that they're very intuitively appealing.
While what you're saying does seem like a direct solution (congestion), it is the wrong solution.
The solution to congestion is robust public transit. Full stop.
If a light rail is more comfortable and a faster experience than a car, people will use that instead. Public transit has been traditionally so atrocious, for reasoning we can attribute to many factors, that most people don't use it even if it existed.
If public transit was actually done right, people would be happy to use it. It is more energy efficient, more cost efficient, less of a mental burden, and I believe can be significantly more comfortable.
This is the fundamental issue for me. Society keeps taking these horrible shortcuts that cost all of us instead of just doing the right thing to begin with.